Everything in me says this is against the rules, so someone please point it out to me or verify it is legal to do so! Thanks!
Please read the section of the rules entitled “The Robot”. As I recall, laptops are not explicitely banned on the robot itself, but they need to use the 12V power supply, not their own battery, which makes them illegal. (I don’t have the rules handy, so I can’t check easily.)
<R51> The total cost of all non-Kit Of Parts items must not exceed $3,500.00 USD. No individual item shall have a value of over $400.00. The total cost of components purchased in bulk may exceed $400.00 USD as long as the cost of an individual component does not exceed $400.00.
That’s retail. So at the least it’s only legal if you can find a retail laptop for under $400. EricH has a good point as well. And then there’s the question of whether you count then fans and hard-drive motors as extra motors and…
Depends on this years rules.
You would have to find a way to power it. Extra batteries are never allowed.
The only problem I would see with doing this is that it must be powered by the robot battery, which means that once the match starts, then you can start it up. By the time windows will start, your match will be over. 
I can’t put my fingers on the Q&A at the moment (if they’re even up still), but I recall the GDC historically deeming hard drives illegal as they use non-kit motors.
but you could use a SS drive now. 
The only problem I would see with doing this is that it must be powered by the robot battery, which means that once the match starts, then you can start it up. By the time windows will start, your match will be over.
Actually, a laptop would qualify as ac ustom circuit. I doesn’t have to be routed through a victor or spike because it isn’t a solonoid or electromechanical device like a motor. The rules say that a custom circuit just needs to be on a 30 amp breaker with your option of smaller fuses on the line running to it. So technically, the laptop would have power as soon as you set up your robot on the field. By the time the announcer finished stating the team names it would probably be booted(except if you are using windoze vista :D).
My team is using a Linux coprocessor this year. While we aren’t using a laptop necessarily (screen+keyboard=too much weight) we are using full computer. We took a mini-itx motherboard and set it up to run off the robot battery. The only violations we managed to find (and I personally think would probably go unnoticed when our robot is being inspected) were the system clock battery and the cooling fans. We can get by without the system clock battery because we don’t really need to keep time. I’m not sure if this is an actual rule or not, but some of my teammates said that there is a rule that states that all fans used on the bot must be the ones in the KOP. In that case, we can just replace the cpu cooling fan with a muffin fan from the KOP because it uses the same power. As to the issue of hard drives, we are using a solid state flash disk. Other than power, I think you could put a laptop on the bot if you want to.
you could do it with last years rules if you used a Solid State hard drive and took out the stock fan and used a KOP one (not to hard seeing that mines cooked by a cooling pad since the internal fan died. you could put a lightweight linux distro on it and hibernate it before a match to make it book quickly. not sure it would be worth the trouble though since most laptops dont have allot of IO but i may be useful for image recognition or tracking of objects etc
…forest
Or build a 19v(thats what most laptops seem to use) DC-DC step up converter, and keep the battery on RIGHT until your about to get onto the field, then remove it to make it legit. In all practicality, laptops are better suited to transmit something over a analog input, and reccive stuff from the dashboard port.
So, of course, you’ll make sure to solve all these problems before you even consider putting this on your robot…
Annnyways. A good Q&A to pose to the poor GDC early on would be how to account for such a system. Do you price the RAM, processor, drive, power supply, etc separately if you buy the separately and assemble it yourself? What if you buy it as a system? What if you buy a system but partially disassemble it? This obviously similarly applies to mechanical systems, of course, but the PC system got me thinking about it.
Thats a good point. But I suppose if a pc system did get expensive enough you could individually price each component. We got ours on ebay for less than $100 and it included the ram and processor.
-Don
just out of curiosity why do you want to put a laptop on your robot?
I could understand for dashboard stuff on the o/i but the robot? (unless you are using it for some crazy powerful camera tracking)
2007 Q&A
8.3 Robot Rules - Hard drive on robot?
http://forums.usfirst.org/showthread.php?t=1095
Q: Are we allowed to have a hard drive on the robot for processing information? Or would we have to use a storage device that has no motor?
A: No, as a disk drive would include an additional motor and would therefore violate Rule <R46>. Solid state storage devices may be used, as long as they are used in compliance with all rules regarding custom circuits.
My team tried this a couple of years ago with the vision tetra.
We used an industrial PC board (486 based), a solid state drive w/ linux OS (small kernal, fast boot ). We used a 5v DC-DC power supply to supply the 5volts to the board (the board required both 5v and 12v). We used an evaluation copy of a LabView inspection program (available to everyone). We were able to track and pick up the vision tetra … but it took too long to run the calculations so we never was able to score with it.
Unrelated to this thread, but I’d be a little uncomfortable using a price off eBay for my cost accounting. The GDC often notes that you need to use COTS Supplier prices for things, and I’m not sure any old eBay store would count. I’m quite certain a personal auction of sale wouldn’t.
I’m not saying you can’t get parts from such places, but you certainly need to get a price from a more standard retailer like NewEgg or something. And if you can’t find that particular system at a standard retailer, then you’d need to price individual parts and add it all up. Of course if you can’t even find the parts at a standard retailer, then you’re in a pretty difficult position since they wouldn’t be legal. The reasoning there being similar to the reason we can’t use our nice non-jittery kit joysticks from 4 years ago and instead have to use the current kit joysticks or find passable modern substitutes.
This is the ruling from the condensed Q&A
8.3 Robot Rules
Hard drive on robot?
Hard drive on robot?
Posted by pmm at 01/10/2007 12:54:21 pm
Are we allowed to have a hard drive on the robot for processing information? Or would we
have to use a storage device that has no motor?
Re: Hard drive on robot?
Posted by GDC at 01/11/2007 08:24:38 pm
No, as a disk drive would include an additional motor and would therefore violate Rule <R46>.
Solid state storage devices may be used, as long as they are used in compliance with all rules
regarding custom circuits.
Personally, I think that allowing this type of device might prove interesting in the long run. However, from an inspection point of view, the “custom circuit” would require some serious investigation as to mounting and securing of said device.
This would be cool…
I’ve always been under the impression that the COTS rules apply only to the robot.